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Jim Simons has died

simonsfoundation.org

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Re: Jim Simons has died

#71

Post by datadrivenangel »

1024core wrote: post #44
filoleg wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

His whole RenTech story was fascinating. Effectively an outsider in finance who gathered a bunch of other outsiders (aka big mathematicians), and decided to start a hedge fund that takes zero interest in the actual companies and trades solely on math. Which makes sense, since none of the main people involved in its creation had any corporate or finance experience, but tons of math experience and knowledge. This is ov…

IIRC his fund averaged around 30% gains per year, every year, over 30 years. (I'm going from memory here, too lazy to look it up). That is just such an unbelievable performance number.

Aren't there some shenanigans with those numbers around their larger funds not doing as well?

It's easy to make a few high margin dollars, hard to make a lot of high margin dollars.

Re: Jim Simons has died

#74

Post by hinkley »

mycologos wrote: post #55
markgall wrote: post #13

Will be interesting to see how this affects math research. He has pumped unthinkable amounts of money into the field. The only first-class flights I've taken in my life were to get to Simons-funded conferences at super fancy hotels. (I found these conferences a bit ridiculous, but the luxury treatment did ensure that they could get together a lot of the biggest names in the field in one place.) Besides the conference…

Hopefully the Simons empire has enough people who will keep executing his vision and stave off bureaucratic rot. Making money is one thing, but circulating so much of it back through math and science is a great legacy.

I wonder if he left any of the rest of his money to the foundation, or if it all stays with his family.

Re: Jim Simons has died

#75

Post by tombert »

amelius wrote: post #66
tombert wrote: post #10

Sadly I've never been able to snag an interview with RenTech (and I've applied like a dozen times), but they're the ones that actually made me start taking finance a lot more seriously. Maybe if I ever finish my PhD they'll hire me. I had previously thought of HFT and Quant as a bunch of "finance bros", and kind of dismissed it as "not real CS" [1]. Reading about RenTech and Jim Simons made realize that there's actua…

I have to confess that I still think that. Where would you recommend I start reading to find financial enlightenment?

I think Veritasium made a really good video talking about some of the differential equations governing option pricing [1] which I found really fascinating. Patrick Boyle's video about Jim Simons' history is really interesting too [2].

Also just reading about Jim Simons' being an already-very-successful mathematician dropping everything to start a hedge fund and ending up extremely successful at the end of it was a bit of a wakeup call. Clearly this was an extremely smart dude (he was the chair of the math department at Stony Brook!), and so if this is interesting enough for someone like him, then it's probably something worth looking into.

I read through a book on basic trading strategies and I thought it was pretty interesting [3], though I've gone in a pretty different direction from what they taught.

[1] https://youtu.be/A5w-dEgIU1M

[2] https://youtu.be/xkbdZb0UPac

[3] https://www.amazon.com/Machine-Learning-Algorithmic-Trading-...

Re: Jim Simons has died

#78

Post by hinkley »

markgall wrote: post #13

Will be interesting to see how this affects math research. He has pumped unthinkable amounts of money into the field. The only first-class flights I've taken in my life were to get to Simons-funded conferences at super fancy hotels. (I found these conferences a bit ridiculous, but the luxury treatment did ensure that they could get together a lot of the biggest names in the field in one place.) Besides the conference…

His wife also helps run the foundation doesn’t she? Looks like she’s ~73 so hopefully has a few years left.

Re: Jim Simons has died

#79

Post by FredPret »

infecto wrote: post #69
belter wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is what they said about Google....

And RT has been around for about twice as long as Google. Has a headcount of around ~300.

It's truly inspiring that they've been able to keep their headcount low over a long period of spectacular success.

Most organizations would have choked themselves on tens of thousands of bad hires long ago.

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